Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation

by Kevin Hart

Overview

An original and profound exploration of contemplation from philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart.
 
In Lands of Likeness, Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226827582
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/06/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Professor in the Divinity School at Duke University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, theology, and criticism, including Morning Knowledge, Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry and The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which was also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Note on Citations and Conventions

Introduction
1: From Templum to Contemplation
2: The Sabbath of the Idea
3: Hermeneutic of Contemplation
4: Contemplation with Kestrel
5: Fascination
6: Consideration
7: From Supreme Being to Supreme Fiction
8: Contemplation with Noisy Birds
9: Contemplating "the True Mystery"
10: "On Course but Destinationless"
11: Mystère and Mystique
12: "To Contemplate the Radical Soul"
Afterword: Poem as Templum

Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Hart, the Anglo Australian poet, scholar and theologian, described by Harold Bloom as ‘one of the major living poets of the English language’. . . reveals, in this splendid new study, his wide and deep learning in the matter of the long history of contemplatio in Western thought and, especially, as expressed in English poetry. . . . Such a breadth of appreciation of literary culture as this has never been more urgently needed.

Quadrant

"[An] arresting invitation to stop and see. Lands of Likeness . . . could not be more timely. For what it commends is nothing other than a way of being in the world that is neither grasping nor hurried, that is minutely attentive to the particularity of things rather than forever looking past them or behind or beneath, that constrains egoism in order to create space for the kinds of encounter that leave us transformed in their wake. It is a book that means to stop us in our tracks, permitting us to look, to linger, to wonder at what is. Or, as Hart rather touchingly writes, for all its theoretical sophistication and immense learning, Lands of Likeness is finally a book ‘about leaves and trees, birds and snails’."

Australian Book Review

"Hart's work has long been marked by a distinctive crossing of literary studies, philosophy, and theology — each of which is present in his latest book. Hart’s focus here is on the idea of contemplation, which he conceives of as a distinctive mode of mental life, a kind of thinking which is different both from argument and from the kind of discursive thinking typically connected to images and texts."

Church Times

Lands of Likeness is one of the deepest accounts of poetry’s cognitive dimensions ever written. What Hart does in the book is explore models of poetic reflection that conform to the models of neither discursive philosophical argumentation nor full-fledged religious contemplation, yet inhabit a meditative domain that is both conceptual and spiritual. I know of no other book that explores this terrain as thoroughly as this one does."

John Koethe

In this learned and comprehensive book on the poetic legacy of contemplation, Hart guides us from the early church fathers to the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many major twentieth-century poets who looked on nature in light of its likeness to spirit. A distinguished poet himself, Hart has much to say to readers and writers of poetry. Indeed, this book will interest anyone who has felt the power of leaving some things unsaid as well as the elation of those ‘hovering thoughts’ that are the book’s focus.

Susan Stewart